“Did it feel different to make it?”
Of course it had. It was her first original, and for the first several sessions, the weight of that had slowed her brush to a crawl. She couldn’t decide how many of her artistic decisions in the piece were being cleverly informed by the artists she’d painted before and how many were simply straight up copied. This was decidedly Turner’s palette, she argued with herself. This was Sargent’s composition. This was still forgery, just good forgery.
But then something had happened on the third sitting. Declan had been telling her a story of John White Alexander’s Study in Black and Green, telling her how sensational it was at the time it was painted, given that the subject of the painting was a woman whose husband murdered her former lover in the middle of Madison Square Garden and got away with it under a plea of temporary insanity. As a footnote, he’d added that John White Alexander was married to Elizabeth Alexander Alexander, a woman who friends had introduced him to at a party because they had the same last name.
Jordan had laughed and her brush, loaded with titanium white, had slipped.
Disaster.
Before she could stop it, she’d darted a glaring line along the edge of Declan’s neck on the canvas. With annoyance, she’d gone in with a rag, but the paint beneath was still too wet to let her completely wipe away her mistake. The edge had been left glowing. But as she turned her head to the side, trying to imagine the fewest steps required to restore the edge, she realized the glow actually looked good. It did not look like reality. It felt like reality. The way the light played against the dark tricked her eye in the same way a real object’s edges did. The dissonance was right.
Instead of repairing it, she emphasized it as much as she dared.
The next sitting, she was even braver. She pushed the effect further, past the point of comfort. Until it was more real than reality. She didn’t know if the effect would work, because she was no longer copying. This was unknown road.
Had it felt different to make it? Of course it had felt different. It felt terrifying. It felt thrilling. She wanted people to admire it. She was afraid they’d hate it.
A Jordan Hennessy original.
“It’s bonkers, really,” Jordan remarked. “The whole thing. A sweetmetal. Everyone’s going mad trying to get one, they’re so rare, it’s impossible. And here I am, thinking, oh, right, well, I’ll just make one, then. I never thought of myself as an egotist, but I really must have quite a pair on me.”
Declan smiled at this, turning his face away as he did, as always. “I’m just surprised you’ve never considered yourself an egotist.”
“That’s very sweet.”
He asked, “Can I see it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re the biggest art snob I know, which is saying a lot, and you’re a capital-L Liar and I don’t think I could take it if you didn’t like it and I also don’t think I could take you lying to me about it if you didn’t.”
With some curiosity, Declan asked, “Do you think I could still lie convincingly to you?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Do you think I would?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“After all this?”
“After all what?” she said, but in a mocking tone. “Just because I stole your car.”
They were quiet then for a space. Declan looked out the window at the dark, more pensive than his portrait. Both Real Declan and Portrait Declan held their hands the same way, fingers unevenly laced, something about them suggesting power at rest, but Portrait Declan depicted the Declan of just a few minutes before, his head turned quickly to hide that secret smile, that private self. Portrait Declan’s eyes were half-lidded, looking away, his expression one of intimate, mannered amusement. Real Declan’s were wide open, mirthless.
“My mother took days to fall asleep after my father died,” Declan said. It took Jordan a moment to realize that he was referring to the dreamt Aurora, not his biological mother, Mór Ó Corra. It was the first time she remembered him doing so. “He was dead right away, of course. Brains bashed in. They had to take some of the gravel driveway with him to clean up the scene, if you can imagine, that’s your job, the shovel, make sure you get all the pieces, don’t want the kids tripping over gray matter. They didn’t take my mother, though, because she didn’t look dead yet. She looked fine. Fine as you could expect under the circumstances. No, it took her days. She ran down, like a battery. The further she got away from him, the longer it had been since he was alive, the less she became, until she was just … asleep.”
It was not his ordinary storytelling voice. There was no theater. He was looking at nothing.
“Ronan and Matthew wanted her awake again, of course—Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t you? Truly, why wouldn’t you, I see that now. I see it from their point of view. But Ronan and I fought. I said it wouldn’t matter, she was nothing without Dad. Always an accessory to him, a reaction to him. Why wake her? You couldn’t wake the dead along with her, so she’d always be a frame for a destroyed painting. We were orphans the moment Dad died because she was just organ death. What was she except for what Dad made her to be? What could she do except what he had made her to do? She had to love us. She was always just an external hard drive for his feelings. She—”
“Just stop,” Jordan said. “You have to know now. Saying she wasn’t real doesn’t make it any easier. Just different. Anger doesn’t mess up mascara as much.”
His eyes were bright but he blinked and they were ordinary again.
“Ronan’s trying to wake up the world. I’m trying to think of how to talk him out of it, but what he’s talking about is a world where she never fell asleep. A world where Matthew’s just a kid. A world where it doesn’t matter what Hennessy does, if something happens to her. A level playing field. I don’t think it’s a good idea, but it’s not like I can’t see the appeal, because now I’m biased, I’m too biased to be clear.” Declan shook his head a little. “I said I would never become my father, anything like him. And now look at me. At us.”
Ah, there it was.
It took no effort to remember the way he’d looked at her the first moment he realized she was a dream.
“I’m a dream,” Jordan said. “I’m not your dream.”
Declan put his chin in his hand and looked back out the window; that, too, would be a good portrait. Perhaps it was just because she liked looking at him that she thought each pose would make a good one. A series. What a future that idea promised, nights upon nights like this, him sitting there, her standing here.
“By the time we’re married,” Declan said eventually, “I want you to have applied for a different studio in this place because this man’s paintings are very ugly.”
Her pulse gently skipped two beats before continuing on as before. “I don’t have a social security number of my own, Pozzi.”
“I’ll buy you one,” Declan said. “You can wear it in place of a ring.”
The two of them looked at each other past the canvas on her easel.
Finally, he said, voice soft, “I should see the painting now.”